ARTiS, an Asymmetric Real-Time Scheduler for Linux on Multi-Processor Architectures

The ARTiS system is a real-time extension of the GNU/Linux scheduler dedicated to SMP (Symmetric Multi-Processors) systems. It allows to mix High Performance Computing and real-time. ARTiS exploits the SMP architecture to guarantee the preemption of a processor when the system has to schedule a real-time task. The implementation is available as a modification of the Linux kernel, especially focusing (but not restricted to) IA-64 architecture. The basic idea of ARTiS is to assign a selected set of processors to real-time operations. A migration mechanism of non-preemptible tasks insures a latency level on these real-time processors. Furthermore, specific load-balancing strategies permit ARTiS to benefit from the full power of the SMP systems: the real-time reservation, while guaranteed, is not exclusive and does not imply a waste of resources. This document describes the theoretical approach of ARTiS as well as the details of the Linux implementation. Several kind of measurements are also presented in order to validate the results.